City of Bohane: A Novel by Kevin Barry Page A

shouldn’t I settle, Jenni? Rest me old bones.’
    She drew a hard suck on the pipe, held the smoke, and then reached and pulled his face to hers, laid her mouth on his, and sent with a sharp hiss the blowback.
    He glazed.
    Coughed.
    ‘Don’t always agree with me,’ he said, his chest heaving, his humours all twisted.
    She reached again and held with her tiny iron hand his chin.
    Locked a glance.
    ‘An’ you’d be doin’ the fuck what out here, Gant, ’xactly?’
    ‘I’m supposed to be askin’ the questions, Jenni.’
    ‘You havin’ an’ aul’ chat with the stoats, G? Goin’ fishin’?’
    ‘You doin’ a little fishin’ yourself, Jenni?’
    ‘All I’m doin’ is talkin’ to ya. All I’m doin’ is passin’ the lonesome aul’ night, y’check me?’
    ‘You got the gift for talk, girleen.’
    She was tiny. She lifted her feet from his chest. She swung her legs from the sofa bed. She padded to the door of the trailer and unclasped the catch and pushed out the door agin the hardwind. She looked out to the night. A swirl of stars made cheap glamour of the sky above the bog plain.
    Without looking at him:
    ‘Y’plannin’ damage for the ’bino, Gant?’
    ‘Would I confide as much?’
    ‘The ’bino’s had wall-bangers come lookin’ for him before, Gant. Same boyos down the boneyard since. An’ it’s a spooky aul’ spill o’ moonlight y’gets down that place, y’sketchin’?’
    The Gant with a cheeky grin:
    ‘Time does he come along S’town in the evenings, Jenni? Usually?’
    She spat the same grin back over her shoulder.
    ‘This look like a tout’s can to you?’ she said.
    ‘Are you fuckin’ him, Jenni?’
    ‘You jealous, G?’
    ‘Or does he mess with the Fancy tush at all?’
    ‘Happens that the Long Fella don’t mess with no tush.’
    ‘Oh?’
    ‘Looked after in his marriage is Mr H. He’s takin’ about as much as he can handle up Beauvista way off the skaw-eye bint.’
    A sly one. Knew where to aim; knew where to bite.
    ‘Oh? Happy, are they? The Hartnetts?’
    She shook her head, and shaped a curious snarl and somehow he read truth here.
    ‘Happy? Who’s happy in fuckin’ Bohane? Ya’d be a long time scoutin’ for happy in this place.’
    She gathered up her clothes and began to dress in the oily candlelight of the trailer. The girl was close to unreadable in the Gant’s view. She had told him nothing about the Fancy, nor about the S’town operations, nor about the movements of Logan Hartnett. Even so, she was keeping close, she was calling on him, and consenting to his bed. It was said this Ching girl had a count to her name already and the Gant was inclined to believe it from the taste of her.
    ‘You can’t stay a while?’
    She didn’t dignify that with an answer.
    And it was a moody Gant she left on the sofa bed as she took off into the night again. Cat’s eyes on her. As easy in her stride out on Nothin’ as she was in S’town or the Back Trace.
    Watch her close, Gant.
    But he relished her, despite himself, and he asked then for forgiveness as the trailer’s siding creaked ominously in the night. Awful thing to still have a taste for young ’un and you up to the view from fifty.
    He lay among the stew of his thoughts a while. Now that was a murky old soup. He rose wearily after a time and dressed. He felt bone-ache and sad bliss. He went outside for a taste of the wind. His mind for a brief stretch ran clear. He closed his eyes and tried to bring himself to the lost-time, but it could never be regained. He would never take back the true taste. He had known it just once and it was Macu’s.
    The Gant walked a keen edge always across the territories of the mind. At any moment he might trip to either side and fall into the blackness. Of course, it is a husky race of people we’re talking about outside in the Bohane creation, generally. Cursed and blessed with hot feeling.
    Images from the lost-time now came to him in quick assault. When she was eighteen.